My Big Goal
You may or may not have been warned that this is NOT just a craft blog. I consider myself a creative and craftsy girl, but believe it or not, not my every waking breath is consumed by crafting. I would say about 20% crafting/working, 50% mother-and-wifeing, 10% myselfing, and 10% exercising/dieting. Wait, that only adds up to 90%? Well hello, I have to reserve the other 10% for generic boring stuff like housework and going to the bathroom. I figured you didn’t need every minute of my day broken down into absolute percentages.
This post is about that second to last 10%…exercise and diet. So here’s the time to be honest with you all. Can I tell you a secret? “No.” Okay, here goes…
I am trying to lose weight.
Whew! That felt good to get off my chest. You may or may not have seen the new little ‘ticker’ at the bottom of my blog. I have a 20 lb goal to lose by November. The reason I am sharing this with you is to help myself reach that goal, by being accountable to my blogging audience (yes even those of you who NEVER comment…ahem!) I want to lose the extra 10 pounds that I haven’t lost to get back to my pre-pregnancy weight, and then I would love to lose an extra 10 on top of that. I am already at what is considered a ‘healthy’ weight, but I don’t feel healthy and I don’t feel confident when I wear clothes that aren’t strategically hiding that nice little ab flab. Wouldn’t it just be awesome to wear anything you wanted and have it look good rather than trying to buy clothes that hopefully don’t draw attention to the gut, hips, and rear? Yes. And I also LOVE (to the point of addiction) the feeling of having a healthy and fit body. Where I can do practically anything. Where I can do a full back bend in yoga. Where I can run forever and feel awesome. I was at that point last summer, when I finally figured out how to get in shape (more on that in a future post), and then I got pregnant. And the pregnancy killed my body…I was so sick the first and last trimesters, and the second tri was during the busy holiday season.
I am not intimidated of this goal. Well, maybe a little. But I know I can do it, and it’s basically losing a pound a week. Heck, I could probably achieve that with a strict diet alone. The problem comes with plateauing, so I’ll have to cross that bridge when I get there. In the meantime, this app is freaking AWESOME. It’s called MyFitnessPal and it’s free.
This is what it looks like. You enter your stats (weight, height, age, etc) and your goal, and it will give you a recommended calorie goal to stay under each day. I think it fluctuates the more you exercise, so the more you exercise, the more you can eat. But it has a pretty large database of foods you can enter so you don’t have to search and enter the nutrition information for everything you eat.
You type in the food, it pulls up a list, and you can hopefully find the food you ate on that list. I have found pretty much everything I’ve eaten so far, but I’ve only been doing it for a few days.
This is the diary. It shows you everything you’ve eaten for the day, and you can look back to see what you ate in the past. It shows you how many calories you’ve consumed and how many you have left. That feature is great, because it helps me pace myself through the day so I know if I want a bigger dinner, to eat less snacks earlier.
You can also log your weight loss on it, and it will show you a graph of your progress. Basically, it’s my little shoulder angel telling me, “hmm…you’ve already eaten your max amount of calories today Heidi, so you really shouldn’t be thinking about getting a Skinny Cow…”
I’m sure you are all dying to know all about my progress towards this goal, so I will share it with you once a week. Lucky you! And ps, I would love to hear any tips, advice, encouragement, etc from you! And heck, if you are trying to lose weight, I would love to hear from you too! Maybe you could even guest post your story…if you are trying to lose weight or have successfully lost weight. Those success stories are amazing.
Good for you! I'm right there with you. I was training for a half marathon, got up to running 10 miles without much problem & then herniated a disc in my back. Ran 2 miles this morning & felt like I could barely pick up my foot. It is so frustrating! But I'll be fighting the fight with you & can't wait to read more. Good luck!
I am trying to lose weight as well, and I hit my 6 week mark today so I can finally work out without worries! My biggest helps have been eating oatmeal in the morning because it fills me up, breastfeeding every few hours, and involving my kids in the workouts
I have done because then I can go longer.
Hi Heidi!
Thanks for the comment on my Lil' Luna Blog. I have to tell ya – I DO NOT know Lyndsay Call. As mentioned in the post, I saw something similar to this at the YW president's home, and asked her who made it. She said her MIL did. I later emailed her and asked her to ask her MIL for permission to make one for our own Enrichment and she said sure.
Any way, my hubby had made the pic (except with the wording: Mesa Arizona Temple, Dedicated….), so we just took that off and added the "I'm Going There Someday…" You will have to tell Lyndsay it was a very popular idea cuz now I'm getting tons of emails with pics of temples to antique and what not. Craziness!! 🙂
Heidi, it's Michelle L from your old Provo ward. I'm writing because I am at a beautiful weight right now and have worked hard to get here! You're definitely on the right track– exercising and watching you eat. The biggest thing that helped Matt and I was to eat LOTS more fruits and vegetables. We tried to make very other meal something without meat and started buying way more fruits and veggies. That, combined with exercising 4 days a week and taking walks with the kids every day is what did it for me!
Good luck! I'm rooting for you!